Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I reached the point of realization that I am just not enjoying Diablo IV. On one level this should not shock me… given how much I have talked about this game not being the game I was wanting it to be. However yesterday over lunch I was playing for a bit and it hit me that I was really not enjoying myself. I think so long as I had the clear objective of “finishing the campaign” I was able to find some joy in the experience. Now that I am turned loose in the world post paragon… and realizing I have a fairly scuffed build that I am uncertain how to fix other than grinding for legendaries or respeccing to whirlwind… I am just not certain the struggle is worth it. I am not necessarily saying I am “done” with Diablo IV, but I am saying that I sincerely doubt I will make it super far running the grinding and gearing treadmill with this game because the moment-to-moment gameplay just doesn’t feel great to me.
I’ve said this in my own fifteen-minute-long video complaining about Diablo IV, but the core problem I have with this game is the way that the world scales as compared to how your power scales. Yesterday Action RPG released a video essentially underlining the same points. Diablo is a game about feeling powerful and smashing demons to jangly chords, and while after the second act, the jangly chords come into play… the cost of entry of the feeling powerful bit seems like it is a bit much. Every level I put on in this game makes the game feel worse until I get a drop… which patches over the problem until I ding again. There is just something about the moment-to-moment gameplay that feels off and maybe it is that the cooldowns are longer than I would expect or that the resource generation isn’t high enough… or that the resource spenders don’t deal enough damage. Whatever the case… I just can’t seem to get to a point where the game feels good.
I still have a lot of maps to see out there, and a ton of dungeons to complete in order to unlock the patterns contained within them. I’ve also not really made a concerted effort to go after the Lilith Statues, so in theory that is probably what I am going to be devoting my time to in the coming weeks as I continue to poke at this game’s carcass. There is a whole lot of map that I have not uncovered, especially in the last few acts of the game where I focused entirely on the yellow quests. Additionally, the Tree of Whispers is not an awful way to progress, and I’ve done a bit of that though really do not enjoy the short timers on all of those missions. I did not realize that your progress expired because I had completed 8 grim favors before logging out when the servers went to shit last night, and logging in this morning all of that progress is gone.
I will say that I had more fun than I would have expected watching the World’s First Hardcore race and I got to see several of the streamers that I follow hit level 100 over the last several days. I find it pretty awesome that a team of Path of Exile streamers ultimately got the first four spots on the unofficial Hardcore Leaderboard. Carn was technically the first to level 100, but Zizarin, Steelmage, and Nugiyen followed a few hours after. Then several hours after that I watched Raxxanterax who is probably the D3 player that I have consumed the most content from hit 100, and a few hours after that seeing Wudijo become the first SSF Hardcore 100 player. I normally do not watch streamers and largely consume content from them when it makes its way over to YouTube, but this time around I was curious how the race was going given that I am familiar with a lot of these people from other ARPGs.
Other than Diablo IV, I spent some time last night screwing around in Last Epoch. I am still working on my wannabe squirrel build and attempting to get the stupid helm to drop. I’ve also contemplated respeccing my Necromancer over to a necrotic/life leech build that I saw yesterday but I do not know how much work that would end up being to relevel my skills after the swaps. The current state of Endgame in Last Epoch feels a little lacking. I feel like I need an overarching goal that I am working towards to disguise the fact that I am grinding. Since there is no real targeted way of farming the exact items that I need, I find it hard to stay focused. In Diablo III, sure I farmed the same greater rifts over and over but often times there were goals that I was working towards like pushing up my GR level higher or leveling Legendary gems. Those took the focus away from the repetitive behavior. In Path of Exile I am doing maps to gain Sulphite and then doing Delve while hunting for City or Boss nodes. The hunt gives me focus and takes me out of the mindset that I am repeating the same loop over and over.
Speaking of Path of Exile… I need to spend some more time in that game soon. I know with Exilecon in July will represent the launch of a new league and I need at least ONE MORE challenge in order to get the pitiful little 19 challenge totem pole. There are three that seem like they are the most likely to finish up so I guess over the coming weeks I will spend some time working on knocking one or more of these out. After that, I am not sure what my focus is going to be. I had hopes that Diablo IV would coalesce into something that I wanted to be playing on the regular but unfortunately, that is not really the case. To be truthful… I didn’t really enjoy Diablo III until the first expansion dropped and changed a number of systems, so maybe there is hope on the horizon. Talking with a few friends, I seem to not be the only one for which the game is losing its mirth. Even then though… I might try leveling something else and see if it is more my speed.
Anyways I hope you are having a great week, and if you are playing Diablo IV that it is giving you what you want from it.
The post Diablo Spectator Sport appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Last night I stayed up a bit later than normal because I was winding down the last few bits of the Diablo IV campaign. I started Thursday evening when the game launched into early access, played quite a bit Friday, Saturday, and Sunday ultimately wrapping up around 11 pm last night. I would love to be able to tell you how many hours I played, but the absence of a /played command or any other sort of player stats prevents me from doing this. That is a microcosm for Diablo 4 as a whole… some aspects of the game are deeply thought out and others seem curiously missing… like the seeming purposeful decision not to have a map overlay. I think this game is going to be a lot of different experiences for a lot of different types of players. If you are the type of player that traditionally expects to play through the campaign of a Diablo game and then bounce… this might be the best Diablo you have ever experienced. If you are more of a Diablo/ARPG hobbyist you will be presented with a cavalcade of choices that might lead you to believe that this game was not designed with you in mind.
I think ultimately for me, Diablo IV is a mixed bag of both brilliance and abject stupidity. For me, a Diablo game is a power fantasy about getting strong, leveling up, and then laying waste to the hordes of hell. In order for that to work, the moment-to-moment combat has to feel amazing and allow you to indulge in the power fantasy of firing off big attacks regularly in order to make the entire screen explode. Combat vacillates between feeling completely brilliant… and feeling plodding and painful and this is largely dependent upon if your abilities are off cooldown and if you have the resources to spend them. Given that the game has not yet officially launched and we already have a significant round of nerfs to slow down that experience… I feel like the game Blizzard had in mind is not the game I wanted to play. We will see if this changes as I begin the gear for the endgame, but the campaign while better than at any stage during testing… was still largely a frustrating mess.
As I have said before I followed a guide for this play through because ultimately I was wanting to give Diablo IV the best possible chance to grab me. Of all of the “spenders” I had played with during testing, the one that I found I enjoyed the most was Upheaval which is a big frontal cone attack. This involves a bit of kiting around but largely that style of gameplay does not bother me. So I ended up following the Upheaval Barbarian Leveling Guide from Maxroll, and for the most part, I think it did as good of a job as possible for easing my leveling experience. At this point, I could respec and try something else and really the cost of just over 94k gold to refund 52 talent points… seems fine given that I am sitting at 1.1 million gold while spending most of the game salvaging everything. I purposefully stayed away from Whirlwind because it clearly seemed bugged… and it was one of the abilities that ate the hardest nerf in the pre-launch patch proving that to be a wise thing to stay away from it.
My path through the game was a bit uneven. For the first three acts of Diablo IV, I spent my time plodding along and completing almost all of the side quests. Then as I reached the end of Act III… I decided that I really wanted a mount which is awarded to you at the beginning of Act IV. From that point forward I pretty much rushed through the game only focusing on the main story arc, because the leveling process had overstayed its welcome. Admittedly this is coming from someone who is used to doing the entire Diablo III leveling process in about 2 hours and the entire Path of Exile leveling process in about 5 hours. The endgame is the beginning of the game to me, and I figured there was plenty of time to start picking away at the rest of the side quests after having completed the story. Truth is… finishing all the sidequests is essentially mandatory for an endgame build as there are ten talent points hidden in the renown system that you are going to need.
As far as the story goes… this is without a doubt the best Diablo story to date and quite possibly the best ARPG story as well. That is admittedly not saying a lot given that most ARPGs only have just enough story to keep the wheels from falling off in transit. Would I consider this one of the best story games when judged against all of the great story games I have played? No… absolutely not. It is a serviceable story, but it is also a Blizzard story, and that comes with all of the baggage attached to that statement. It is a story about big forces moving against the player and plot twists that you can see miles away. However, it is still a fun epic romp through some really large set pieces that serve as an excuse to set up some big fun battles. The only real complaint that I have is that much of the denouement of each conflict plays out in the form of a cutscene that you watch through Blood-O-Vision 3000… as you touch Lilith’s Pedals. Diablo has always been known for its cool cutscenes and this is no different, but they also serve as the key method in which the larger plot moves forward which may or may not be your personal taste.
Most of the boss encounters are legitimately good. There is enough room to scale them up in order to create something akin to the Uber bosses from Path of Exile. On lower difficulties, they serve to feel just challenging enough to not fall over immediately as the bosses in Diablo III did. There are a few fights that felt needlessly tanky… but I chock that up to the general lack of balance, the game seems to have. I feel like Diablo IV is a case in point of why you don’t get rid of Q&A employees as Activision Blizzard has had a habit of doing over the last half dozen years. I think Diablo IV could be a great game given enough time and focus to balance the game into something that actually feels fun all of the time… rather than feeling fun under exactly the right conditions.
I’ve now officially entered the endgame of Diablo IV, but can’t really talk much about it yet. I unlocked the Tree of Whispers which gives you access to the Whispers of the Dead system. From what I understand a zone is marked by the tree and you are sent there to reclaim “the debt that is owed” I won’t go into that in any more detail as it could provide some spoilers. Essentially it is a bounty system that involves you going and doing specific activities in a given zone in order to collect Grim Favors. Grim Favors are then turned in for rewards from the tree that I believe give you access to legendaries and nightmare dungeon glyphs. Nightmare Dungeons are effectively mythic plus from World of Warcraft and the glyph is somewhat like a map in Path of Exile and will set the affixes being applied to the dungeon. I legitimately have only played long enough after the campaign to unlock the dialog box explaining this system and then took a screenshot of the area of the map it was being applied to this morning. I am sure later this week I will have a more cogent set of thoughts about this system.
If you want bonus points… you can listen to me ramble for twenty minutes about the live service dystopia we find ourselves in, and some of my fears about what a battle pass system will mean for this game. Of note… this was recorded before I started focus firing the campaign and doesn’t really reflect much on the game itself other than my general concerns. There are times I feel like recording one of these videos and I did so yesterday morning. Basically, my thesis is that a given player only has time to play one live service game at a time, and as a result, EVERY live service game is ultimately competing with every other one.
I think ultimately my stance is the same as it has been for a while. I think Diablo IV is a great game for the players who will play through the campaign once, and then move on with their lives… maybe to revisit much much later but won’t be mainlining the game. Was it the game I had hoped it would be? No… not in the least. Does that make it any less of a good game? No not really. I think Diablo IV is a very solid game that is just fun enough to get you past some of the major frustrations. I think the first map sucks ass and they would have been far better starting the player in the second map… Scosglen. Scosglen feels and more importantly, SOUNDS like a Diablo game. Diablo is a game about killing demons to jangly chords… and Diablo music finally starts to kick in during Act II.
If I had any bit of advice for new players approaching this game… it would be to do NOTHING but yellow quests aka the main questline… until you reach the beginning of Act IV and complete the quest “Donan’s Favor” and then from that point forward you can return to screwing around and doing side quests at your leisure. Mounts make a massive difference in improving the quality of life of this game and in truth Blizzard fashion… you are robbed of that experience until you are almost done with the campaign. Knowing what I know now… I would essentially rush to the point of having a mount and then return to a leisurely leveling pace. However for all characters from this point forward… I probably won’t actually do the campaign given that unlocking the mount once unlocks it for all of your characters.
I know that I am a very specific edge case when it comes to Diablo players. I liked Diablo III and felt like it got a lot of things right. Diablo IV feels like an overcorrection in attempting to erase the legacy of Diablo III from memory… while at the same time reconning some of the story elements to essentially make that game more or less not exist. As a result, Diablo IV is a direct sequel to Diablo II, in both stories… and the plodding feel of combat. If you loved Diablo II… and have played it recently and still can affirm that it is your ideal Diablo game… then Diablo IV is probably going to be a gift from the heavens planted at your feet. If you liked Diablo III… this game is going to feel like an uncoordinated mess at times. If you are a big fan of Path of Exile… this is going to feel like a bit of a slog compared to how relatively fast moving through that game can feel. Still, I don’t think Diablo IV is a bad game… and pending Blizzard gives the game some TLC over the next few years it might even become a great game.
I figure I will spend some time exploring the end game, but also am more than likely to happily jump on the next game that comes along which catches my attention. This is probably blasphemy… but I think Diablo Immortal was actually a more mechanically enjoyable game than Diablo IV. Too bad they chose evil and went full-on into microtransaction hell with that one because it is more the direct sequel to Diablo III that I really wanted.
The post Diablo IV Campaign Finished appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV and I did in fact play the game as the servers came up. There was a bit of weirdness with battle.net as things launched but it had resolved itself within the first fifteen minutes. After that for the most part it felt like logging in and playing any game that had been active for months. I feel like whatever work Blizzard did ahead of the launch was deeply beneficial to the stability of the servers, because while we have yet to see what a difference the “standard copy” players make on the 6th… for the most part every was solid. In fact, I would say that the game itself performed far better than I had experienced in any of the closed or public testing phases that I had participated in. The entire game just felt snappier than I remember from the last public test and I am not sure if this was engine optimization on the side of Blizzard or the fact that Nvidia released brand-new drivers for the game launch. Whatever the case it felt pretty great, which I guess is making me question some of my early opinions of the game.
I made a Barbarian, and effectively the same one I have made a half dozen times in various testing phases which allowed me to breeze through the character creation boss. As far as a skill set I decided to give Maxroll a shot and follow their Upheaval guide since of all of the fury spenders that one felt the best to me in previous phases. Now I am uncertain which is the case, but either Blizzard significantly buffed the Barbarian to make it feel better at the early stages of the game… or the entire game has been nerfed a bit. Whereas before combat felt sluggish and plodding… it now feels snappy and fluid. I gotta say… I don’t hate this game. It still isn’t really an ARPG in my book… at least not one in the traditional sense but for an Isometric MMORPG it feels pretty solid. Maybe I have just had enough time to get over my initial disappointment, or maybe it is the fact that I have largely finished with the current Path of Exile League and have mentally put that game to bed for a while. Whatever the case I had quite a bit of fun last night. Not so much fun that I did not have a pause mid-evening to go out and play with the outdoor cats.
When I say… something significant has changed what I mean is that I am level 15 and have mainlined the story through the first zone and have not taken a single death yet. This is very much NOT the case in previous testing phases. Barbarians had to basically spam potions to survive the early phases of combat and it feels like I have barely had to pay attention to my health other than during boss fights. Someone from the team had announced that this was pretty much the same build as the most recent stress test, but I do not believe them at all. It does make me want to fire up a Necromancer to see what the state of minions looks like and determine if that is also fixed. Whatever the case… my opinion of Diablo IV as a whole would be massively different had I experienced THIS build in any of my testing phases. I’m not sure what last-minute balance changes were made but they certainly feel significant.
The cash shop is now available in the game, and it is in fact a cash shop. Some of the cosmetics are pretty good looking, like this crusader-esc outfit for the Barbarian. However, most of the cosmetics are kinda fugly. Like maybe I am just not as big of an equestrian person, but it feels like a lot of effort went into the horses in this game and they are all sorta awful looking. I am hoping there will be mounts OTHER than horses… because really… I almost NEVER ride a horse in an MMO. Give me a big bear mount or something like that, and you might pry some money from my hands. Maybe it is a side effect of growing up around horses my entire life… but they are sorta boring. Essentially there is a single outfit for the Necromancer and a single outfit for the Barbarian that I consider worthy of a purchase, but the rest of the dross is kinda “mid” at best. Essentially the conversion rate of Platnium to dollars is $1 to 100, so the big fancy cosmetic armor packages are $24.
All I really did last night was make a beeline through the story bits that I have seen multiple times for this first zone. I’ve not even unlocked most of the map, so in theory tonight I will be spending my time branching out and exploring things… and now I feel like I have the motivation to actually complete all the dungeons to get the imprint unlocks. Mostly I wanted to finish up the story while I was still relatively low level in case they had not resolved the problem of leveling up and making you feel weaker. So far that has not really been the case, which I am hoping means that is the side effect of more balance changes. I am sure I will be focused on this game for most of the weekend and will likely give you a more formal review on Monday.
I created a Clan last night if any of the usual suspects want a home. However, I am rapidly realizing how long I have been away from Blizzard games and how pretty much everyone has a new guild family that they play with. I will admit it was a little weird to see that <House Stalwart> had been created and that I had nothing to do with it. Granted I have been “Not-The-Guild-Leader” of the guild that I founded far longer than I was actually the leader, and it has always been in great hands with Kylana. I figure <GREY> will be pretty small in Diablo IV given that I am not sure if any of the AggroChat regulars intend to play the game. That said if you need a chill home feel free to apply in the game or hit me up while I am playing for an invite. I left it public so folks could sign up while I was offline.
I’m still not entirely sure what I think of Diablo IV. I think better of it now after having played this latest version… but it is still not necessarily what I was hoping it would be. I think this is going to be a great game for most of the players who decide to pick it up because the vast majority of Diablo players as a whole… get in… play through the campaign once or twice… and then uninstall the game feeling satisfied maybe to revisit it at some point in the future when they get the itch. I do wonder what the endgame and seasonal cadence is going to look like going forward. I’m not entirely certain this is going to be a game for the players who have adapted to the ways of Last Epoch and Path of Exile. In fact, I think there are probably going to be some players who were waiting around to see what Diablo IV was… before finally committing to those games. I do have to give Blizzard credit for starting to change my opinion though with some last-minute tweaks and balance changes… and an incredibly stable launch night.
The post Rethinking Diablo IV appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. Yesterday in the AggroChat Slack there was this whole thread about growing up in the gifted and talented program, but also being just “gifted” enough to fully understand your own inadequacies. I felt this so damned hard because this is essentially the story of my life. I was on the mediocre end of the gifted pool and while I participated in all of the elevated events, and was actually good enough at the academic bowl to place in the district banquet and force the horrible football coach to have to accept an award on my behalf… I never really felt good enough to actually be recognized as such. For most of my life, I have been “winging it” and bumblefucked my way into the occasional success. Take for example this cosmetic outfit that I am wearing on my Explosive Arrow Champion. There was no real planning here, just me clicking on a few random cosmetics because I hate the default look of low-level gear in Path of Exile. By sheer accident, I came up with something that I really love, which is this whole microcosm of my life as a whole. Any real success that I have had… has been purely by accident.
I know yesterday I released this entire blog post talking about my experiences from the Diablo IV Server Slam weekend. Yesterday I decided that I wanted to refine those thoughts a bit and opted to do so in a video of me playing around on my Scion in Path of Exile. Something that I have noticed about myself is that often when I sit down to write about something, it causes me to re-evaluate that topic in my head. This video is largely the place I arrived at after writing an entire blog post about the experience. It allowed me to really refine my thoughts into a sharper point and get to the crux of what my primary problem with the game is. I decided to skip the clever title card and just go with something way more honest. If you want to hear me ramble on for fifteen minutes about the core of my frustrations feel free. But I will skip to the chase and tell you that ultimately it boils down to the level scaling feeling really bad.
In the video, I am poking around at a new character that I have been leveling that I called BelGlamrock mostly because the default Scion appearance looks like an outfit straight out of the hair metal band era. The weird thing about this character is that I honestly have no real intention of ever gearing it fully or turning it into a real character for playing the game. Truth be told, I am not sure if I really like the Scion as a starter class at all. It feels kind of directionless, but I guess that makes sense given it doesn’t have a fixed starter location on the passive tree. The benefit of the class is that you can mix and match the ascendency style of the other classes and build a sort of hybrid to do very specific things. This also feels like the weakness of the class because it doesn’t really have an identity of its own.
Ultimately I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish with the character. It was a means to an end and the fact that I had never gotten the achievement for killing Dominus on the Scion bugged me for some reason. I don’t fully understand why I have been motivated to get specific achievements in Path of Exile given that I have never really been an achievement-focused person in any other games. Generally speaking, the only achievements that I spend time on, are the ones that give me something tangible as a reward. This is in part why I have enjoyed the Achievement structure of Guild Wars 2 because almost always they end in some sort of interesting tangible reward. My drive to get achievements in Path of Exile however completely flies in the face of my well-established patterns. I get nothing from having knocked these out other than the sense of checking something off a long list of achievements that I have yet to complete. Similarly, I have this irrational desire to run two characters through Act 2, just to side with the Bandits I have never sided with before in order to knock that achievement as well.
Speaking of achievements, I am nearing 19 league challenges which will give me another sad little totem pole for my hideout. In order to finish this off I respeccced my Atlas Passive tree to drop support for incursion and pile on some of the Abyss nodes. I realize that Abyss is not exactly great in this league, but I am pretty close to knocking out the challenge associated with it. Essentially I need to find several more 4 pit Abysses and I think by trying to force the chance of seeing an Abyssal Depths… it will cause this to happen. In the grand scheme of things I really like Abyss as a mechanic, but it does feel way less rewarding than it did before their most recent revamp. I am going to be running maps anyways to build up sulphite for delving so I might as well be getting the mechanics I need for challenges in the process. I also have a stockpile of abyss scarabs that I can use to force it as well.
I am not entirely certain what my exit strategy is for this league. I’ve still not earned my last two void stones, so given the state my Explosive Arrow Champion is in, I might lend some focus to that. I’ve tried to accumulate the fragments needed for shaper and ultimately uber elder organically, but that is really slow going. I am wondering if I should just use some of my war chest of resources and buy the fragments that I need outright. I still find Delve deeply relaxing but also I am starting to feel a little listless there. I’ve taken down three crystal kings in recent days and failed to get a good amulet, but even if I did get a good one… what exactly would I do with it? I am not sure there are other builds that I really want to spend time doing given that in this league I have made four completely functional builds for doing the various content that I really want to be doing.
I think maybe when I finish up this 19th challenge for the league I might take a bit of a break. I can do so happy that I accomplished pretty much everything that I really wanted to accomplish save for the Uber bosses. I might take a run at those, but to be honest… I don’t really love bossing in the first place. I like the big loot explosions that come from lower tiers of activities and I can’t really bring myself to buy an endless supply of fragments from the trade league in order to chain-run bosses. I might want to do some more heist and burn down my contracts a bit, but other than that… I think I can maybe put the Crucible league to bed for awhile.
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